The Copyright Office picked Sony over you; fails to expand DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions to devices other than cell phones, or to the sharing of anti-circumvention software.The FSF has fought for years against the threat of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). Users should have the right to modify, share and learn from the software on their devices, and technical measures put in place in the name of DRM offer a substantial roadblock. It's even worse when those measures have the force of criminal law behind them, threatening people who simply want to change the software on their computers with jail time. The FSF wants to create a world in which there is no DRM. Until then, at the very least, users shouldn't have to worry about legal consequences for disabling these malfeatures on their own devices.The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of course circumvents the rights of users by making it illegal to modify your devices in ways that would give you actual access to them, or to share tools to help others do this. Congress did create one small carve-out from this belligerence; that once every three years the Library of Congress (via the Copyright Office), would consider making exceptions to this broad rule. In 2010, the Office recommended exempting the freeing of cellphones. They did not, however, make clear that this exemption extended to people who distributed tools for freeing these devices. In 2012, we had hoped to expand the exempted class of uses, and encouraged the Copyright Office to extend exemptions to tablets, gaming consoles, and computers running restricted boot. We were on the side of organizations like the EFF, and the Mozilla Foundation as well as hundreds of other individuals calling for the protection of those who simply want to be able to use their own devices in freedom.But we were not the only ones to send recommendations to the Copyright Office. Large corporations like Sony, and corporate-backed groups like "Joint Creators and Copyright Holders" also sent comments opposing these reasonable exemptions. And the Copyright Office fell for their FUD. The Copyright Office has announced that while freeing your phone in order to install your own software is still permitted, unlocking the phone in order to switch carriers will be phased out. And even that minimal remaining protection has not been extended to tablets. Offering the duplicitous explanation that they weren't sure what a tablet was, the office completely abdicated its responsibility to protect users' rights to run their own software on their devices, as well as their rights to works locked down on those tablets. They similarly rejected exemptions for users wanting to install their own operating system on game consoles, and even worse, failed to extend protection to users who want to install their own operating system on computers with restricted boot.This means no longer being able to switch your own cell phone carrier without permission. This means no modifying tablet operating systems without legal threat. It means that trying to install a different operating system on your game console could result in the FBI breaking down your door. It means that you cannot even be sure of your right to remove proprietary software from devices encumbered with restricted boot.The Copyright Office picked Sony over you. They had an opportunity to protect users, but instead chose to protect corporate interests. This is a terrible outcome for users everywhere, and just proves that we need wholesale elimination of the anti-circumvention laws.We need to band together. Here is what you can do to help:Join our Boycott Sony campaign to let Sony know that this sort of behavior is not acceptable.Sign our statement to Stop Restricted Boot.Donate to the Free Software Foundation to support our efforts to fight bad laws like the DMCA.http://www.defectivebydesign.org/sony

<< from a forum post>>Hi!reading back some of my posts I've noticed that my enthusiasm asking for help or pushing people to contribute to +Synfig has decreased lately.

And that's not possible!! Synfig needs (must) to be in continuous change, evolving for the excellence and becoming the leader of the 2D animation of the FOSS world.

So what does a leader application needs?Le me list them here (not in specific order):

1) Good documentation.2) Stable coding cycle: Feature->develop->release->feedback->debugging3) Modern input and output support (media and human interfaces)4) Good support in all platforms.5) Friendly user interface/intuitive6) Fast user response. Ready for work-flow

Good documentation: This is the basic element to make the user experience satisfactory. Although even if the application interface is self explanatory, it is not possible to expose all the features in one single interface. A good documentation is always an unfinished project that needs continuous polishing. Is anyone doing anything on document Synfig?

Stable coding cycle: When someone want to make some serious work, it is needed that the tool you use has good support. The feature->develop->release-feedback->debugging cycle is essential for the free open source software and its strength is based on this cycle. One application is nothing if there is not a good user base using it that complete the cycle of feedback bugs and feature requests to make the application better day by day. I wouldn't continue using any application that looks dead without development support because I don't have any guarantee that the new bugs that might be found will be addressed or new features are added. It is essential that the application continues working on the new platform versions or finally it will die. Is anyone taking care of that?

Modern input and output support: The applications has to adapt their interface for data input and output to the new formats and devices. Video and audio input and outputs in all its codecs formats, new human interfaces devices and new vector and raster formats are essential for the future of the Synfig. Is anyone taking care of this area?

Good support in all platforms: It is absolutely needed to have good support for the basic platforms. If we are not updating the support for Windows for example better to leave the platform and concentrate the efforts on the rest than continue having bad feedback from Windows users. Sometimes I've been tempted to rewrite the core of Synfig just for Linux with parallel computing support due to the complexity of keep it for all them. We need to think about it. Is anyone working to improve Synfig in Windows?

Friendly user interface/intuitive. There are many aspects of Synfig Studio that can be improved. Some of them implies a lot of work but once done (if well done) would allow a very much better development of the new features. I'm not going to list all the needed changes in this matter because they have been extensively discussed in the forum. Is anyone doing something tangible on this?

Fast user response/ready for work-flow: It is very hard to work with an application with a high latency. Most of the time of work of the user is wait the system to respond to the changes and that's absolutely inadmissible. The main bottle neck of that comes from the floating point calculation of the raster operations that are made by Synfig when rendering an scene. Specially there are many vector operations that are made in the raster space instead of the vector space. That's OK for certain operations like a blur or a noise distort but is not admissible for a rotation or a shape boolean operation. For better render speed I'm working on Cairo render but there is many aspects to improve in that area. Later, a transition to perform the vector operations in the vector world (in opposition to the raster world) is also absolutely needed.

This listed areas are just the core of the needs of the project. Synfig needs other aspects that aren't listed here: logical support for the above points (wiki, source code repository, tracker system, website), internationalization, administration activities. All those needs someone that takes care of it. Apart of Zelgadis, is anyone interested on take care of it?

As you can see this it not a task for a single one person. Not for two nor three. Synfig needs a supporting community.

I love Synfig. It has many features that are awesome and the potential of dozen of them that would make it the pioneer on the graphics & animation world. So why don't people see this? Why don't we have dozens of coders knocking for patches acceptation and hundreds of users requesting new features?